


love songs, drug songs

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Season 6 Spoilers, as many as it takes, background lance pining for allura, how many times are you gonna have to save me before this is all over?, i just ... i really love keith, kamikaze keith problems, second person pov is kind of a wild ride, the bravest boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-05-24 16:05:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14957774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: Keith is willing to die, and die, and die again if it means Shiro will live.Eventually he learns that love means more than just that.(an examination of Keith, and the way his heart changes, season 4 - season 6.)





	1. keith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookyfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyfoot/gifts).



You’ve always heard the stories about what happens when people die: _your life flashes before your eyes. There’s a long tunnel, a white light. Time slows down._

This is not how you thought you’d die. Your hands are steady. Your eyes are closed.

There’s no tunnel, no light. You feel the way you felt in Red, like a stone falling into the place of its deepest and darkest belonging.

_How many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over?_

This is not how you thought you’d die. Your hands are steadied only by their white-knuckle grip on the controls. Your eyes are closed.

Galaxy Garrison’s second-best pilot plummets like a shower of meteors.

_As many as it takes._

This is not how you thought you’d die.

 

 

**I.**

 

 

Except: the fall doesn’t kill you.

The shield evaporates in front of you and it’s only instinct, pure instinct, that makes you pull up.

When you made your moonlighting with the Blade of Marmora permanent, Kolivan accepted you without so much as a blink. Later, though, he appeared briefly on the observation deck. You have a habit of hunting down places to stargaze, and this is one of them. You can’t make sense of the constellations the way you could in the desert, but it never stops you from trying.

It’s just gotten harder to find your place.

Kolivan tells you what Shiro told him, at the Trials of Marmora. _He told me you’d never quit._

 _Yeah, well._ You were bitter, then. Twice now in your life you’ve allowed Shiro to be a universal constant, a thing you have always expected to have. _He used to know._

Maybe your body doesn’t know how to do it. The meat of you: your bones, your sinew — you’ve taught them how to take a beating, but you’re not made to surrender.

Matt is screaming at you on the comm. _What the quiznak was that, Keith?_

Extraction has become one of your specialties, now that you’re a Blade. _Knowledge or death,_ you say, tonelessly. You make two sets of calculations at once: first, you determine how long you have before Matt tells Shiro about what it was you nearly did. Then you punch in your flight trajectory back to the Zaiforge cannon, and you put all of it behind you: Haggar’s ship, Lotor, Naxzela, Voltron.

Shiro.

Matt’s voice follows you across star systems. _Keith. Keith, talk to me._

 _Matt,_ you lie, _the math on this was simple. Don’t overthink it._

 

 

**II.**

 

 

You miscalculate. Matt tells Pidge first. Her face appears on-screen as you execute your landing-sequence. “Keith,” she says. How Pidge can be so gentle and so insistent at the same time is a mystery to you. “Keith, Matt told me what you were about to do — if Lotor hadn’t —“

“Pidge, I’m fine.” You’re not: your hands are shaking, now. You tell yourself it’s a logical response; the adrenaline that floods your system every time you fight has to go somewhere, and fighting is all you do now.

“You almost died,” she says, quietly. You recognize the hallway she’s standing in at the Castle, and can almost appreciate that she’s decided not to chew you out on the bridge in front of everyone. “Keith.” She says your name like it’ll center you, but you know better. You are a feral city, and you’ve only ever given one other person the keys.

Once you get back to the cannon, you’ll formally hand over command to one of the other Blades and get back to base. Your room there is sleek and simple and once the door closes behind you, you’ll have the thing you love and hate most: your solitude. Time alone with yourself and your choices. “Keith. You can’t die. You’re not allowed.” You think both of you know that you’re not any good at listening to the rules, but that’s not what gets you: Pidge wields her compassionate heart like a bayard and sucker-punches you in the stomach with it. “I would miss you,” she says. Your eyes sting. “We would miss you.”

You miss them too, but you won’t admit it. You can’t. You’ve made it this far by not looking too hard at the way Shiro, who once promised you he’d never ask you to choose, _made you choose,_ and the only reason you’re still walking forward is because you don’t let yourself look back.

“I’ll do my best,” you promise, but you’re thinking about math again.

Like the black lion: it’s you or Shiro.

And the math is simple.

 

 

**III.**

 

 

Back at base, Kolivan takes your debrief. “You were prepared to die,” he murmurs, as unreadable as ever. You’ve been practicing for this, have counted constellations glinting past your window while you contemplate an answer.

“Someone had to do it,” you say. It sounds teenage and petulant, now, like you’re back in that office in the Garrison, explaining your fresh bruises. The fact that Kolivan won’t just kick you out like he ought to is a scab you keep picking at because it reminds you of someone else.

“Sure,” Kolivan agrees. “Some _thing_ did.” He’s too careful with his words for his meaning to be missed: _why did it have to be you?_ Kolivan is a tactical genius; you imagine him ejecting into space, leaving the ship on its kamikaze course. Except that’s not even the lion’s share of the criticism. You both know that it was you because you’re the only one who had the motivation.

You’re a simple creature of instincts. You have just the one trigger.

 

 

**IV.**

 

 

The call from Shiro never comes. You keep expecting it to, one way or another. You think he’ll show up the way he used to at the Garrison, and maybe you’ll pop into a Marmora fighter and take it out to the edge of the galaxy. That’s what it was like back home; you’d hop on the back of a bike and ride it out into the desert and stay there until the sky turned black and the stars glittered white and everything was beautiful and clear. But Shiro hasn’t been quite the same since this latest rescue from the emptiness of space; you’ve bickered over everything there is to bicker over and because you’re you, you can’t help but boil it down to your own worst nightmare: Shiro is the universe’s gold standard, and next to him, you don’t stack up.

Lance calls. But not because you were stupid with the ship. Or stupid in general. You listen to him as he complains about the castle’s latest occupant; Lotor is genuinely suave, the way Lance has never been, and whether his mistrust is wise or simple envy, you can’t quite tell. “Man, and he gave Lotor the black bayard just in case we got double-crossed, and it worked out I guess but Shiro didn’t tell any of us, and then what, Lotor just … _uses_ it? Of course he does. Pantene commercial alien genius vampire boy just casually activates a bayard …”

“What.”

“Oh, _come on_ , Keith. You know what vampires look like.”

That’s not really what you mean, but you drift into silence while Lance rambles on. You’re usually not so willing to be a distraction for him, but something about his tone makes you think of a wounded animal and, well. You guess you’re pretty good about recognizing those.

It stays in your thoughts like a splinter for a very long time, afterwards: Shiro, handing off the bayard he fought so hard for. Shiro, who’s poured himself into the Black Lion over and over again; Shiro who you watch pulverize his own heart and then feed it to the machine, just to try and purge whatever of Zarkon remains.

Shiro, shut out from Black again and again until he broke through in desperation when _you weren’t there,_ and now you’re still not there; you’re here, with the Blades, and technically it was your choice but you can’t help but feel like it was really his, can’t help but wonder if you’re just another weapon he’s foisted off into other hands.

You don’t understand it, and you don’t understand _why_ you don’t understand it, because Shiro has been a constant for you for a very long time: a north star, a best friend, and then something else entirely. You’re used to a life full of problems, take them on with clenched fists and sharped knives, but misunderstanding him is not an issue you ever thought you’d have.

“How’s Shiro handling it?” You ask, because you’re still on the comm and you’re under some obligation to pretend to participate in the conversation. It fools Lance, who just wants to rail on Lotor some more, and proceeds to do so. _Oh, just quiznaking fine, they’re going to be great friends —_ but you can’t ever fool yourself.

 

 

**V.**

 

 

Kolivan tells you there’s another mission. The words _Kral Zera_ rumble through the Blades you’re deployed with. You’ve read the brief, but that doesn’t mean you understand the weight of what it is you’re setting out to destroy. Thirteen thousand years of empire is such an absurd number that you can’t wrap your mind around it. _Knowledge or death_ is the motto of the Blade of Marmora, but here you all are, rattling through space to destroy the Galra archivist and the succession of thirty-three different rulers.

It’s a textbook operation until you see the Black Lion. Kolivan has made every calculation, has a list of the candidates ready to light the flame, including Prince Lotor, and whatever sacrifice happens now, whatever destruction of history, he has determined that all of it will be worth it to strike another killing blow into the purple heart of the empire.

Kolivan’s math didn’t account for you and Shiro.

You start dismantling bombs. The whole place erupts anyway.

Prince Lotor, ally of Voltron, who Kolivan was willing to kill, lights the flame.

You are half-Galra, yourself. You do not kneel for him.

For a moment you are reunited with the grin-bright faces of your pack, fierce with their triumph over so many of the Galra generals and Zarkon’s witch. You let Lance punch you arm even though it ripples with bruises; you ruffle Pidge’s hair; you let Hunk sweep you into a back-breaking hug. Allura smiles at you, though her eyes drift upwards towards Lotor, at the top of the pyramid, and while she’s watching him, Lance is watching her, and now at least you know that your heartbreak isn’t unique in the universe, although it certainly feels that way.

Even Shiro touches you this time, his hand heavy on your arm, and for a moment his eyes are soft. This is part of the trouble: sometimes he still looks at you like you’re precious to him. It’s happening with less and less frequency these days, like a candle burning out. Every time he does, though, the feral love that lives in your chest resurrects and comes roaring back to life, all teeth and claws; sometimes you think it’s the most Galra thing about you, the bits and pieces that keep screaming _Shiro or death._

“Shiro,” you say, still pretending not to burn. He smiles at you.

“The Blades were here, huh?”

Back to business. Of course. Unhelpfully, all you can think about is what that smile does to your insides, and the way Shiro’s fingers have curled just a little bit around your armor. Those hands have ripped more orgasms from you than you like admitting, even when sex was still a thing you did on the regular, colliding in hallways back at the Castle and stumbling into each other’s rooms.

That’s not what you miss about him, though.

“Well, good thing that worked out,” Hunk quips, sarcastic, and Shiro’s fingers tense for just a moment before he pulls his hand back.

“I told you,” he says. “Nothing to worry about.”

Hunk looks at you; you look at Hunk. “I used to think you were the stubborn one,” Hunk mutters, jerking a meaty thumb in Shiro’s direction. _“_ Then _this guy_ flies Lotor here by himself, after all the rest of us said —“

So Kolivan didn’t know, then. Keith catches himself grinding his teeth. The war’s been hard enough to win without the risks of accidentally blowing each other up. “Did you really?”

“Don’t worry about it, Keith,” Shiro says. Not for the first time, you miss the way he used to say your name.

“Sure,” you say. The beast in your chest paces and sulks. _Whatever you say._ You don’t stay for long, after that. You can’t.

 

 

**VI.**

 

 

Krolia sees him once, you think, while you both drift and jump through space and time. Every flash of light teaches you about how joy and despair are both separated by the edge of a knife.

When she leaps in front of you to block the burst of golden light, something in you startles with memory: this is what it’s like to be held by someone who loves you more than they love themselves.

You talk about him more than you should, riding on the back of an interplanetary atmospheric space whale, pacing back and forth until your heels have dug a small trench into the cave. “Do you think they think I’m dead?” You want to know. You’ve measured time by the growing of a wolf-pup you’ve rescued; it still won’t play fetch, but by now when it blinks back and forth to play, it always knocks you down. You’re trying to be casual about it.

 _They_ could be anyone; Voltron, the Blades.

You mean _him,_ though, and somehow she knows it. You don’t know if Shiro would mourn you, now. But on the off chance that he would, you still want to spare him. “Who is he?” She asks. You pretend to be ignorant but there’s no fooling your own mother. “The one you’re close to.”

“His name is Shiro,” you say, slowly. You imagined a lot of things about your life, but never that you’d have the opportunity to ever say anything like _mama, I’m in love with a boy._

You get taller, broader. You’ve always heard time cures a broken heart, but this place does something different; nurtures the memory of what you and Shiro used to be until you can feel it holding you up and affirming you like a second skeleton. Away from the war and away from the Blades, you come into yourself more. You discover that love is not a liability, and when you uncover an atrocity beyond measure, it is this love that gives you even more purpose and drive and determination to make the return journey back.

After all, Lotor has the throne now, and Shiro’s the one who put him there.He’s more trusting than he should be. You still love him for it. You think maybe you will always love him.

You are like your mother in this, more than you even know, but you learn from the way she lets love make her stronger, even when it hurts her, the way it does when you admit that your father is gone to a place neither one of you can bring him back from.

Sometime during those two years you stop calling her _Krolia._

She tells you what the Galra word for _mother_ is.

 _Do the Galra have a word for love,_ you wonder.

_Of course we do._

It occurs to you that you’ve never told him. Not in so many words.

 

 

**VII.**

 

 

He is Shiro and he is not Shiro. You are equal parts relieved and horrified; you have kissed the man who is trying to kill you, now. You snuck into his bed more than once before things began to fizzle out, before your pieces stopped fitting together.

You had always assumed it was _you._ Now you know that it was _him._

“Neither one of us is leaving.”

This is not how you thought you’d die, snarling and kicking and hissing at the person who is your entire universe and, in a strange way that you can’t process, also isn’t. You fit yourself into a snarl; you are rabid-eyed and wild, nothing more than the will to live and meat.

“That’s the Keith I remember,” he says.

As messy as the two of you have ever gotten, as rough, you know that can’t possibly be the case. It’s the soft things you remember, everything that’s ever come after the bruises.

You’re not going to die before he knows.

You say them, the three words, and you can see in his eyes for a moment that the arrow of them still sings, strikes, hits — in whatever way it can, given that he is just a manufactured edition of the real thing that you love — hits home.

You did think you’d die holding onto him some day. But not like this. The base falls apart; the two of you drift. There is no oxygen in space; this is how it will go: you and Shiro, drifting into the light.

You close your eyes.

You love him.

You think, somewhere, the real Shiro knows it. You realize, suddenly, startlingly: it's not just a thought. You know that he knows. You know it the way you know how to pilot and how to fight, the way you know everything else you were ever born to do.

 _I love you,_ you think. The stars are bright and so, so beautiful. The universe sings.

You think you are going home. You know when you get there that it is somewhere that he'll be.

 

 

**VIII.**

 

 

You see him on the astral plane.

He smiles at you in a way that makes you know, bone-deep, that it’s him, and he tells you that he’s all-but-gone, except for the way Black keeps him; the way you’ve kept him, stashed away in the lion’s mystical, magical heart.

_How many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over?_

You are with all of them: your pack, your lover, when he opens his eyes.

Your body sings with it.

“Keith.”

“Shiro.”

You think maybe now you’re going to start living.

_As many as it takes._

 

 


	2. shiro

You've fought Zarkon and won, but you've surrendered everything you have in the process.

Funny. You went into space expecting to say  _goodbye_ and you've been trying to say it ever since, in every near-death scenario, traveling to the Blades and telling Keith that someday he ought to replace you. It's the habit of a sick, sad, lonely man who never expected to survive for this long in the first place, someone unaccustomed to the idea of a long and easy life, still reeling from the loss of a relationship it was unfair to commit to in the first place. You got a diagnosis once and you gave yourself over to the words  _life expectancy_ and you decided to give more of yourself than anyone ever has, and you've been giving ever since. 

Adam was right about that; you gave yourself to the Mission. There wasn't anything left for him.

Pure quintessence is erupting all around you. 

 _Take care of him,_ you think, in your last moments.  _Take care of Keith._

You've been expecting this handover ever since he rescued you -- again -- after your encounter on that wasteland planet, the one where Keith saved you  _again,_  although sometimes you think you'd almost succeeded into deluding yourself that you'd survive it.It isn't even really because Black allowed him to pilot. It's because you know Keith. You've known Keith from the moment you saw him looking out the window in the back of a classroom. You've seen in Keith the things he does not know how to look for in himself.

Isn't that what love does, though?

_Love._

You are dying. You are dead. It's a word that shouldn't be able to still rip through you like a knife to the back, but somehow it does. You love him and you haven't told him.

Not in words.

You've told yourself you didn't need to use the words, and now you're dying in a quintessence field, thinking about the first time the two of you kissed -- after the fight with Haggar, after you got out of the cryo-replenisher, and you got back to your room, and then suddenly he was there, the way he always suddenly  _is_ there. If there's a slow way to do something, Keith Kogane doesn't know it. One moment he'd darkened your doorway and in the next second he'd pushed you against the wall, fists clenched in the fabric of your shirt, with a mouth firm on your own, like if he kissed you hard enough you might suddenly love him back. 

It wasn't the first time you thought you'd glimpsed it. That love.   
  
You understood it the first time at the Marmora base. Had considered it, long after, like someone troubling a scab. 

It was just the first time you understood the risk, the real danger: that maybe in response something else might roar to life in you.

Now you're dying, and you're in love with him, and you haven't told him, and you won't get to say goodbye.

 

That's when the panic hits.

You have been wrong about so many things.

Now you get to be wrong  _and_ dead.

 _No,_ you think. The last things you'll ever think.  _Wait. I love him. I can't --_

 

 

 

**I.**

 

 

 

You discover you still exist slowly, in pieces, the way humanity's ancestors must have done once as they left the oceans for dry ground. Around you in all directions is a sky littered with stars and purring on the edges of every one of your senses is an inky black presence, as dark as space is. 

You think about the blue lion, hidden on earth for centuries; you connect dots you've never really thought about before.

You reach into the annals of history and you give the thing infinite thing that surrounds you a name. You call her  _Sekhmet.  
_

Lion-headed, goddess of war.

All around you she waits to see what you'll do next.

But you can't quite find the words. You're still dead. There is nowhere you can go.

Where you are time is not a concept that exists, so you have no way of knowing how much of it has passed when you hear Keith's voice across the stars, distantly, like the radio signals Matt was always so much more interested in tracking than you ever were.

_"I know you wanted this for me, Shiro, but I'm not you. I can't lead them like you."_

_Keith,_ you think. And as soon as you think the words you're seeing through her eyes because she's made you a part of her now, and the machine is humming back to life. Keith is there in the cockpit, his hands on the thrusters.

You love him, still. Maybe this is the only way you'll ever be able to tell him, now.  _He's worthy of you,_  you swear to this thing, the creature that has a life all its own. _I promise you he's worthy._

Black purrs back to life. The last thing you hear before you dissipate back into stardust and space is Keith's stricken voice.  _"_

 _Please,"_ he says,  _"No."_

You won't realize until much, much later what it was he was asking for, that somehow this changing of the guard might mean anything except for the terrible, shattering truth: you are a fragment of a consciousness, held together by machine and magic.

You are dead.

And yet, you realize, you are not quite gone.

 

 

 

**II.**

 

 

The next time you see through the eyes of the beast you are looking at yourself.   
  
 _"Please."_

 _That's not me,_ you think. Around you the lion is silent as someone wearing your body begs her for help.  
  
 _"People's lives are at stake. You trusted me once. Trust me again."_

 _Keith,_ you wonder, distantly. Every so often you've been able to feel him as he pilots, burning and brilliant as a young star. You're past needing the validation of knowing that you're the one who saw that spark for what it was.

Just glad that you were lucky enough to witness it.

Still, this thing that isn't you is in the pilot seat, doing the thing you've all done before, the thing you realize now, of all times, is prayer. The word's always felt clunky on your tongue, offensive to modern, scientific sensibilities. It took Keith for you to understand worship.

You watch, torn between these two realities: it should be Keith in that chair, and it isn't. Rapidly, you are coming to the conclusion that things must be dire if Keith isn't here: desperate, driven Keith, always at the ready to sling himself headlong into impossible odds. That suddenly becomes the primary fact of the situation, your mirror-self a mystery that will have to be solved by something more alive and more capable than the scattering of your thoughts across a beam of quintessence.

 _Tell me he's not dead,_ you demand of a dark intelligence which owes you nothing and never has.  _You saved me. You could save him._

 ** _He's not you,_  **the darkness hums back. You look at your own face. You feel something you haven't felt in a very long time: resignation.

You would watch a stranger live your life a thousand times if it meant Keith burned on.  _He's close enough._

 

 

 ** _He is you,_** he thinks the darkness tells him. He is hardly even particles.  _ **You,**_ she says, ominous,  _ **and the witch's splinter.**_

 

 

 

 

**III.**

 

 

 

After that you hardly ever see the cockpit. It feels distant in a way you understand because you, yourself, are startlingly distant from any mission. You are a tactician at your heart; you trade in facts. You could have been married once, or you could have gone on the Kerberos mission and furthered the reach of mankind. Look what you chose.

In retrospect you understand why Zarkon's hold was hard for Black to shake, in part because you notice the absence of Keith by comparison.  _Patience yields focus,_ you always said, trying to tame a primal force, a being of absolute instinct.

You miss him. 

You think it's this absence of the thing you love that starts to drain you of your awareness, your ability to exist in this place. You have no ability to measure how quickly or slowly it's happened, only that you are fading, and Black is quiet, all phenomenons you will later be able to attribute to an energy-draining virus once you have all the facts, once you become a being that can care about facts again. 

Pools of light form in the place where you are. You don't have eyes for them to catch, but your attention coalesces as your friends do. Four of them and a purple stream of light standing empty. Waiting for someone. 

Keith still isn't here.

But maybe you can tell them, and then they can tell him, those words you've been holding onto for all this time.

"Lance," you say. Lance can get through to Keith, maybe, even if it'll cost him a black eye to do it. "Lance --"

 

 

 

**IV.**

 

 

You feel him again suddenly and all at once.  _Keith._

You vibrate with this name; your being was built to sing it. Around you, Black is both alert and alarmed, you can tell, but you don't know why, you won't know why, the two of you are rushing for him and suddenly he's -- he's  _here._

"Keith." You could say his name a thousand times and never grow tired of it, and as you do, he ignites again. You coalesce long enough to try to explain. "I died, Keith," you say, and you see the way it momentarily shatters him. 

You've had all the time in the universe in this place and now there will never be enough. You've always thought you could be so strong, and now you can't stay together long enough to tell him that you -- 

"Shiro?" At least he still exists, you think. In this place he holds form and shape in a way you can hardly manage. Even with the scar on his cheek and the bruises, he looks good. A little taller, maybe. Stronger.

You're so proud of him. _"Shiro!"_  
  
He calls you back from nothingness twice more before it's all said and done, and from the astral plane you feel the battering surges of a fight you can't see.

Then something gentle and soft comes for you. It smells a little bit like jasmine.

You wake up coughing and collapse into Keith's chest, which is a revelation: you haven't had a sense of touch in who knows how long. It would have been a stretch to say you could _see,_ where you have been. But you can see now, and that's your whole team, your friends, staring at you with tears in their eyes, and that's air in your lungs as they start to cough and wheeze in protest. The real miracle is Keith.

"You found me," you say.

 

 

**V.**

 

 

None of it changes the agony of what comes next. You move into the clone's body like an unwanted parasite, into a brain that's got a whole legacy of memories you don't want.

You re-live every fight while this new body of yours tries its damnedest to evict you, including  _the fight._ The witch's splinter, Black had called it. Just a sliver of Haggar.

You think the clone might have loved Keith, or tried to. You see it in the way he'd tried to be a leader again, instructive. He's made up of all of your memories up to your escape; he's more Garrison instructor than he is Paladin of Voltron. Keith reacted accordingly. None of that hurts as much as the strained  _I love you_ that had rattled out of Keith's mouth on the brink of death, the words you hadn't allowed yourself to say. 

When you wake up it takes a while to adjust. You run your hands over everything -- the Black Lion, the strange fur of Keith's new space wolf -- every sense is a luxury. 

You touch everything but Keith. Because this body you're in tried to kill him.

 _I love you, too,_ you think, every time you catch him watching you when he thinks you aren't looking, every time his brow furrows. You've died once and you're alive now and you still can't make yourself say it.

 

 

 

**VI.**

 

 

 

Something finally breaks on the long, endless journey home, when it's just the two of you on one of Keith's regimented sleep cycles, holed up in the Black Lion on pads that are so close that if you wanted, you could reach out and brush his stubborn bangs back, or trace the scar on his chin and marvel that he still looks at you sometimes like you matter.

His breath tells you he's not asleep. Neither are you. He doesn't check to make sure. "I fucked him, you know." Keith says. You do know. You've had to assemble a self out of what was left of the clone, and the only way out was through. 

"You didn't know," you murmur back. You've thought about it already -- it's not like any of you are lacking for time, taking a journey back to earth at speeds which you would have marveled at just a few years ago and which infuriate you now -- and it doesn't bother you.

Keith is silent for a long time, long enough that you think you may have said something wrong. You're opening your mouth to apologize, you don't know what for, except this: the body you're in tried to kill him once and you will be apologizing for the rest of your life. "That's just the thing," he mutters. "I think I did."

He tells you all the ways that Shiro wasn't you, points out every decision you've had to analyze and know you wouldn't have made. "He gave Lotor your bayard once," he adds. "You would never have given -- I think --" 

Time with Keith has taught you to wait. You turn on your side, ignoring your stiff shoulder and the phantom limb you've lost underneath it. You can't say you miss the arm. 

"When we first found him," Keith whispers finally, "I think I thought if I -- it's stupid --"

"Nothing you do is stupid, Keith."

"I thought we'd sleep together and he'd be you again."

"I'm sorry," you say. His brow furrows as he turns over, propped up on an elbow, and stares at you, and now you know for sure that somewhere along the way, you've said the wrong thing. 

"You're sorry?"

"Sorry it wasn't me," you clarify. He studies you, all sharp eyes and the subtle scowl you've learned to love. He's grown into his edges while you've been gone. You think that's probably a good thing. Now both of you know who each other is, without the other. "Keith, it's fine. I'm not -- I'm not jealous. Or angry. You had every reason --"

"Then why won't you touch me?"

Now you're the one caught off-guard. "What."

"You've put your hands on every fucking inch of this ship," he snaps. "But you won't -- we haven't --"

In the Astral Plane, understanding had come to you slowly, and with great effort. You still aren't quite used to how quickly reality strikes, rapid as a coiled snake and three times as effective. "Oh." Understanding dawns like a sledgehammer. "Keith," you say, and you repeat his name because you can. That's one of the joys afforded you now that you have your third lease on life. "Keith, that isn't why."

"Then what?"

"I tried to kill you."

"He <i>tried</i> to kill me," Keith says, concisely. He sits up fully, and then he crawls over. You weren't dead for so long that you can't read the liquid intent of him, like gasoline, ready to erupt at a moment's notice. Still, he climbs over you with care, settling back on his legs, and then he takes your hand in one of his own and runs it over his quad.

Keith is the one person who's ever made you want to be selfish; your fingers ignore commands for reason and squeeze, digging into muscle that you don't fully remember. He's lived two years that you didn't, now, and you've been dead, and now both of you are walking, breathing paradoxes. "You said yourself. It wasn't you."

You try to summon a valid counter-argument, but he's got you beat on every front: if you insist on bearing the guilt of what someone else once did with this body, then so will he.

And if you let it go, then, well: he can be free of it, too.

You think of that first kiss again, Keith in the doorframe and then not, and this time you're the one who surges up, hungry and howling for this thing you can finally put a name to.

You use your words because you better understand the luxury of them now. Of time.

"Keith," you say. It's a messy kiss, terrible and urgent, too much teeth. You suck in a breath and you make your hand move slowly.

You have permission to relearn him and so much time. 

"Keith."

"Yeah?"

"I love you, too."

 


End file.
